The thread below has the test case that we were able to use to reproduce the issue.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2004-04/msg00280.php
The last messages on this subject are from April of 2005. Has there been any successful ways to significantly reduce the impact this has to multi-processing? I haven’t been able to find anything showing a resolution of some kind.
We are seeing this on two of our machines:
Quad 3.0 GHz XEON with 3GB of memory running PG 7.4.3 with SuSE kernel 2.4
Dual 2.8 GHz XEON with 2GB of memory running PG 8.0.0 with SuSE kernel 2.4